The present invention relates generally to managing transactions and transaction data, and more particularly to generating reports for human resource-related transactions in an enterprise environment.
As organizations continue to move to paperless systems, the complexity of managing transactions electronically within an organization increases accordingly. Complex workflows are needed to provide the functionality needed to process all the variations of a transaction in a number of different situations. For example, an employee might submit a transaction that requires approval from at least one manager, supervisor, or other appropriate person. The approval process might then have several steps, which occur at different times, and may include a number of different details. Further, multiple people may approve, deny, or otherwise touch the transaction, and some of these people might designate another person(s) to act on their behalf. A user might also have multiple jobs, such that different managers approve transactions for different jobs or roles of the user. The amount of data and the rules and context needed to interpret this data make reporting on, and analyzing this data, increasingly difficult.
Many existing systems simply store at least a portion of this data in at least one data repository. In order to generate a report, a user typically must generate and execute multiple queries to obtain the appropriate data for the report. Further, some data is stored in code form (such as “A” for approved or “D” for denied) which must be translated by the user in order to be of use to someone analyzing the report, and further for the user to know how to interpret and utilize the data.
Further complicating the matter is that reports typically are run in multiple formats. When generating forms for the government, a PDF file often is generated, while a finance department might want the data in a spreadsheet format, and payroll might want the data in a rich text format. Executives or managers in the company might prefer HTML reports that they can quickly access online. Generally, the user separately generates each of these reports in each of the necessary formats. When generating a spreadsheet-based report, for example, a user not only has to set up the report format and configuration, and use macros or generate code to do any necessary translation, but also typically has to query and import the data into the spreadsheet application to run the report. When several different reports need to be run for a large amount of data for an entire organization, this process is slow, costly, and inefficient, and has several opportunities for error.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that this patent application is presented.